On The Brink with Castle Island - Balaji Srinivasan on building digital commonwealths (EP.43)

Episode Date: February 17, 2020

Balaji Srinivasan is an angel investor and entrepreneur. He was formerly the CTO of Coinbase, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and the co-founder of Earn.com, Counsyl, Teleport and Coin Center. In this episode we discuss:   - the 100x' crypto has delivered over traditional finance - how Balaji's views of what Bitcoin is good for have changed over time - the 'sovereign collective' versus the sovereign individual - whether Twitter is a functioning digital commonwealth and the prospects for Bluesky - why handles on social media might more closely resemble property than a platform - what Balaji is trying to achieve with nakamoto.com

What's up, everyone? This week, we have an amazing guest in Balaji, Srinivasa. Balogi is a former CEO of Coinbase, the former chairman of 21 Inc, later called Earn.com, a former partner at A16C, and the founder of a successful genomics business. So, as you know, he made a splash recently with his announcement of Nakamoto.com, which is designed to be a forum for discussion of cryptocurrency. This caused a bit of rancor in the Bitcoin community. Balagy is well known for having a expansive thoughts on a wide variety of topics, and he's not afraid to share them publicly and solicit feedback in the process of ideation. So we were lucky enough to sit down with him for an hour and get his views. So these included his thoughts on how cryptocurrency is already

100x improvement over traditional finance. You know, what Bitcoin is good for and how his views on that have changed over time, his diagnosis of the issues with social media and potential fixes for that and how digital handles might be better described as property as opposed to just a platform. So this was an absolutely fascinating conversation and it was an education for both of us. I hope you enjoy it. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market and the Fed is asleep.

The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Welcome to the On the Bring podcast.

I am Nick Carter. And I'm Matt Walsh. And we're sitting here in the Coinbase offices with Balji Srinivasan. It's a pleasure to have you on. Thanks so much. Thanks, guys. So, Balji, we're really excited to have you on the podcast today. You're very well known in the crypto asset circles.

People know that you are a partner at Injuries and Horowitz. They know that you founded 21 Inc. But let's just hopefully just start off with a little bit of background. You're an accomplished entrepreneur even before crypto. So can you talk a little bit about your career arc and how you got to where you are today? Sure. Yeah. So parents were immigrants for our immigrants from India.

And I grew up in New York and came out to California when I came to Stanford as an undergrad. my BSMS and PhD in electrical engineering and MS in chemical engineering and taught computer science and stats at Stanford for a few years, and basically in kind of statistical genomics, computational genomics, intersection of genome sequencing and DNA and computer science and stats. And then there's a branch point where the question was, was it going to be a professor at MIT or Caltech and try and, you know, go down the tenure track route? Or would I take the leap into the unknown and actually go and start a company. And you might think, well, of course, everybody at Stanford, you know, go and start a company. But 10, 12 years ago, that wasn't actually as common an option outside of computer

science by itself, right? So being in the bio wing of things, it was a little less common thing, right? And in fact, a lot of people told me something, which was interesting, they're like, if you leave academia, you won't be able to come back because you're going to be rusty. You're not going to have publications for that time period. And so the career you've spent building up until this point, you're really taking quite a big risk. And, you know, you may not be able to do it. So actually a bunch of people advised this against it. Also, at the time, there was a company called 23 and Me, still around, which had just announced that had gotten all this funding from Google. And so other people were like, no, you're just going to get crushed by them. They have so much

money, blah, blah. And but we, you know, nevertheless, we went and started a company. It was called council and I was CTO and co-founder of that and we built it from a dorm room at Stanford and sold it for $375 million and it's much harder than it sounds okay there's a lot of difficulties that went into that that's sort of how I kind of cut my teeth on entrepreneurship and learned that there was more life than multi-dimensional integrals because basically for the first you know 20-something years of my life as essentially a mathematician you know statistician you know computer scientists or whatever And, you know, I exaggerate there.

Obviously, I knew there was more to life besides that. But I didn't fully understand how challenging business was, right? And what I mean by that is I thought the hard part of a technology company was the technology. And that seems actually intuitive from the outside. You know, if you nail the algorithms, if you nail the math, if you nail the biochemistry, well, the rest of it should be relatively straightforward. But what I learned was sales is really important and your branding and marketing and management and your supply chain.

Oh, and by the way, you know, you can't just have humans in our clinical laboratory. We needed robots and so we have to program all the robots and we needed something to manage all the chemicals in our fridge to make sure they didn't expire because they were inputs to this. And so it actually became a very complicated operation, oh, an insurance building and we have 50 different regulatory regimes in different states we have to deal with. And what about shipping and making sure a sample arrives and it's on ice? Like the complexity just explodes, right? And it's much, much more than just hitting enter on a computer. And so that was useful. It taught me a lot. And after, you know, counsel, I wrote like sort of a download, like letter to myself, right? Okay,

five years ago, 10 years ago, had I been a PhD student, what would I have wanted to tell myself about starting a business. What were the things I didn't know that would be useful? Those turned into course notes and became the basis of a pretty popular course on Coursera. I had about 250, 275,000 students, which was actually quite a lot even for a MOOC course today, and at the time it was like really big. And that was actually one of the first MOOCs, I think maybe the first MOOC that talked about Bitcoin. And I gave people a Coinbase tutorial, and a lot of folks actually, one of the developers at Bitcoin.org got his start from that course. And so a lot of people bought Bitcoin from that course, and it was at like $10 or whatever,

and they thanked me later or whatever. Not that I was saying to buy, we were teaching the technology of it, but it was something where I think a lot of people got their introduction from that. So I did that in 2013. I've also been an angel investor in a number of startups that you might have heard of, like some notable ones, Soylent, Superhuman, Lambda School, Cameo.com. Cameo.com is kind of cool where you can pay Snoop Dog to say whatever you want. Yeah, right.

And, of course, a bunch of early cryptocurrencies and what have you. And then, you know, I joined Anderson Harwoods as a general partner, and I helped, I think, boot up both their crypto and their bioarms. And did a lot of, you know, recruited Vijay, who's, you know, basically the first partner on the biofund itself there and worked closely with Chris Dixon on a lot of the crypto stuff. Then I took over. So then now it comes the camera pans to where people in the crypto space will, you know, kind of see things. Oh, one other thing I did, I basically stayed kind of off the radar. I wasn't on social media or anything like that until late 2013, which is a very late adopter of social media. The reason for that is I didn't really understand social media, or rather, let me put it like this.

I thought social media was just wasting time. And frankly, it is for a lot of people, right? But what really got me into social media and Twitter were actually two things. The poll, I remember there was a moment where a colleague of mine was live tweeting a genomics conference. And he was giving a summary of the individual slides and so when I was like, man, this is useful. Because it saved me a plane trip. It was a much more technically accurate rendition of the events and more detailed than any journalist would normally have cared to offer. And it was public where I could ask questions and, you know, like say, oh, hey, did they actually, you know, do 30x coverage on that?

or was it a 10x coverage, you know, just like technical questions like that. I was like, oh my God, I can just drink in this whole new stream of information. So that was when I actually learned the power of Twitter for good. Where I learned it for ill was basically, you know, you're not saying like Lenin saying, you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you, right? You may not be interested in Twitter, but Twitter is interested in you, right? And so if you're involved in any controversy and you're not on Twitter and you haven't built up your kind of thing on Twitter beforehand, and you're just going to get crushed

and you're never going to be able to get your own story or whatever out there, right? Yeah. And nowadays, I think I've, you know, like, I don't want to, I don't want to, like, jinx it or whatever, but I've kind of become bullyproof. This is the term I'm kind of using. Bullyproof?

Yeah. Like, people use uncancelable, but I like the term bullyproof because, like, bulletproof, but bullyproof. I like that. And it's actually a useful metaphor because you can think of bullyproofing your entire social supply chain in your life

such that you're kind of immune to, like, these mob attacks, right? You actually think of that, like a, not first class, but certainly a top five or ten problem in constructing a company. Your entire social supply chain, you want to make sure that any key node is also bullyproof. Because if one of those supply chain nodes collapses, like a key investor drops out, or, you know, you have a key employee quit, or a partner will, you know, de-platform you from an API. It can shut down your company.

So insofar as you expect attacks from certain directions, you can bullyproof yourself. And, you know, one aspect of that is having enough of a social media following and also, I think enough of a confidence in one's own self to be able to just, you know, kind of resist, right? So that was kind of Twitter for ill. I saw a lot of people getting dragged, attacked, et cetera. And, you know, it's like, okay, there's a poll of the knowledge. There's a very good. There's also the push of, you know, hey, you know, like you may not be interested in Twitter,

but Twitter is interested in you, right? Okay. And you've dealt with this very recently even. Yeah, but you know what? Like on the scale of things, I would call that like that's a three. Okay. On a 10. On a 10, right?

And the reason I say that is to the outside world, a lot of this stuff like that we talk about within crypto just looks like really energetic Jets versus Giants fans. You know, it's not an issue that animates, you know, it's like Python versus Ruby, you know, right? It's not an issue that animates the general population, and they just look at it as some stupid slap fight within the space. Now, I actually think that if crypto increases 10 or 100x, which I do believe it will over the next 10 to 20 years, that our intranescine issues are going to become like the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Right. Like these, it will expand to become a bigger issue societally, and it will actually polarize, right? But it's not there yet. and so thus kind of a tempest in a teacup right now.

But just recursing back to 2015, just, you know, finish that up. So I took over a, you know, so I was at Andrewson. I'd helped set up 21, formerly 21E6, and, you know, basically I'd been there as chairman and helped, you know, set it up, but it was full time at Andreessen. And the company initially did extremely well because Bitcoin Price was high. was one of the first data center based mining companies. It made tens of millions of dollars in the first calendar year. And then it made tens of millions of not dollars

because price crashed. And all of this Chinese hash rate came online. And it was in trouble. And to make a long story short, took it over in mid-2015. We were basically, the company was very heavily in debt. It was like negative 50 million or thereabouts on the books. And it was something where the mining product was just not profitable at $200 something dollar Bitcoin where things were fixed.

And beyond the prayer of hope the price goes up, which it eventually did, but you can never know that at the time, you know, when that's going to happen. Beyond that prayer, we had to figure out, you know, something to do. We started with basically like sort of the Hail Mary of, you know, I had two different problems. One was A, trying to get out of all of these data center contracts, which were these huge, huge contracts for long terms.

And B, figure out how to ship some kind of product, because it's not enough to just cut span, have to, you know, get revenue going. To make a very long story short, we did put out this, you know, 21 computer. And I still think that there's a lot of aspects of that, which are interesting for the long term. For example, coinmine.com, you know, I'm investor in that, that's what you're doing quite well now, right? And I think a lot of the APIs and demos and so on that we did with 21, for example, we had a demo where you pay Bitcoin to view a web page and a demo where you pay Bitcoin to, you know, send an SMS or for an API call and so on and so forth. Well, there are companies doing those things right now.

Exactly, that's right. So I think a lot of those things were actually like conceptually influential. And, you know, we'll see how many of them come to pass. One thing I want to do is actually go and repost all of our old tutorials and just kind of update them and update the source code or what have you. So you can just, you know, curl and run them. What happened was basically we'd been betting incorrectly on micropayments working for Bitcoin in 2015 and thereabouts. and for a variety of reasons that became infeasible, you know, in part like the whole, you know, Bitcoin Civil War would have, you made clear that you're not going to be able to just do lots of payments on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Okay, fine. So what did work was of the various applications we had built for that 21 computer, paid email, worked, right? There was definitely traction with that. So we shifted to that. It was like the third pivot, but that one actually worked. And so now we were able to turn that into a large and growing business. we're actually profitable at the time the company sold to Coinbase. And today, we integrated that into Coinbase. It's become Coinbase Earn.

If you go to the Coinbase.com homepage, you can earn like $186 in crypto as a new users. It's become a huge thing for Coinbase, and the Coinbase execs have talked about it, but it's on hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. You can confirm that, for example, if you just go to Stellar alone, Stellar about a year ago, if you look at Stellar's announcement of their Coinbase Earn deal, they put a billion XLM into Coinbase Earned. And that's like $100, $120 million or whatever on that order just by itself. And the reason is, Quentin Bistern has become basically the largest scale of customer acquisition channel in crypto.

And to understand why that is the case, let's say you've got a new crypto project, a new coin. You know, if you want to acquire customers or users or whatever for that coin and you have some treasury that should do that. And, you know, now we're talking about the coin managed in kind of a centralized way, right? Well, the obvious option is go and try to do Google, Facebook, Twitter ads, and acquire users that way. The problem is, first, often those platforms won't even accept you. And if they do accept you, you're liquidating your coin and tanking the price for all existing users to acquire new ones. So you're disaligned with your existing users. And at the end of the funnel, what are you doing?

You're going to basically send them to an exchange to go and buy that coin, right? So then there's another customer acquisition channel for the exchange itself. So the alternative is, with Coinbase Earn, the reason a lot of coins have done these deals is they take their treasury and they put it in a crypto-aware channel to crypto-aware users. And now those crypto-aware users, it's not an airdrop, it's an Earn drop where they have to do tutorials and they have to actually pass some bar. They have to spend some time on the thing. They have to understand it. And in some cases, they have to do a task that's related to that blockchain. For example, with Maker Dow, you have to take out a decentralized loan.

to get the die. For Zcash, you have to send like a shield of transaction, or at least, I'm not sure if that's live yet, but that's on the road map, right? You have to send a shield transaction. We want them to send a shield transaction to get some ZEC, right? With bat, you actually have to download the brave browser, which has the bat loaded into it. And you start to actually have something where folks are educated on it, and this serves many different purposes. One is that rather than just dropping undifferentiated coins into somebody's account, like an air drop, people actually do a little bit of work to earn it. So they value it more. Number two is, you know, I think they've published the stats on this, but the vast, vast, vast majority of

people hold and don't immediately sell. And then there's another portion of them that buy. And so it's actually something which is not like people just liquidate immediately. Once they see what the thing can be useful for, most people hold a small minority sell and a larger minority buy. Okay. So then unlike the other example, we're acquiring those customers required you to tank the price, this is actually neutral to sometimes even positive on the price, right? Okay. And the other thing about this, which is really useful, is it establishes that if people are buying, they're only buying after they've used it. Right. They have seen this is actually a differentiated thing. Oh, that's cool. I can do decentralized loans. Oh, that's private transactions. That's

differentiated, right? And so they make the decision to buy after they've experienced the utility. So you actually sort of have a receipt that says, hey, 90, 99% of the users who bought actually had utility beforehand. And all of that together is like a pretty good package for the asset issuer. Now, for the user, it's also really good because they're getting quasi-free crypto. I mean, they're earning it, right? They're doing something for it, but it's actually kind of a lot of money, right? $186 is pretty legit, right? And of course, for Coinbase, it's great because, you know, we are acquiring customers and we're making them happy, right? One way of thinking about this is a lens on Coinbase is it's a place to make money for the long term in crypto. And that's one lens,

not the only lens, but investing and buying and selling crypto is one way to do that. But what are other ways? You can earn interest, right? You can do staking. These are things which we've offered, right? You can take out decentralized loans or what have you and go and trade somewhere else, do your own thing. Or you can just earn the crypto directly, which is not buying and selling. You're not sending in capital for the crypto. You're saying in time. You're just, labor for the crypto, right? And so these are all things which are actually aligned with that general thing of make crypto, you know, make money online, but for the long term, not in a day-traded kind of way. So anyway, it's, it's become like one of the highest NPS products at Coinbase or

whatever. I just, the reason I just say this is, I kind of think it's been under-advertised, just given how huge it is for Coinbase and how like, you know, how much traction it has, and how large the dollar numbers are. It's just something that for whatever reason it hasn't, like, got in public pickup and awareness in the community. Anyway, go ahead. Now, I think Nick and I are power users or were power users of the initial email product. So it's an awesome product. I want to take us back to 2013, which you talked about.

So, yes. I remember in 2013, I watched the speech that you did at Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley's ultimate exit. And for me, it was a really transformational way in my relationship to Bitcoin. So initially, I had viewed Bitcoin through just a pure technology. revolution. And watching your speech, it really made me broadly understand the political and economic ramifications of this technology at a societal level. And so I'm wondering if you can just talk a little bit about how you first heard about Bitcoin and how you got to that point in

2013 where you were able to articulate what Bitcoin is from a societal level. Great question. So, well, so first, and I'll go to my personal history of it, if you want to learn JavaScript. You can learn JavaScript. You don't need to learn any history to understand why JavaScript is useful. You just paste in a snippet into the browser. It just works. Boom, right? To understand why Bitcoin is useful and why you can't just send something on PayPal, you actually need some history, right? You need to understand, oh, well, money has been seized. Oh, you know, like there's Venezuela. Oh, this is the history of monetary policy and so on and so forth. And so Bitcoin comes with it a bunch of philosophy, which has kind of been missing from the

tech industry in some ways, right? Like, I don't think all the criticisms of tech are accurate, but I do agree that you can do tech without understanding the liberal arts, and that is something which is a demerit, right? Like, it is good for people to know history, to know philosophy, to know literature. You know, that is a good thing. What's interesting is when it's a necessary thing. I think it's a necessary thing to understand that stuff in order to build products in this space because it gives you a sense of, all right, these are the things that can be built with crypto that could not be built before and to understand that you have to need to know the history of payments and monetary policy and what have you. So that's kind of why, you know, I talked about

some of those aspects in that talk. I think it holds up well today, by the way. Like it predicted like the tech lash and a bunch of other things and I think it holds up pretty really well. In terms of my personal history with Bitcoin, I should look back. in my email us to the exact, like, first date or whatever that I got into it. But I was definitely aware of it at least by 2011. And maybe earlier, I don't remember the exactive. I think 2011. And one of the reasons that it caught my attention, there were two reasons.

First is after doing counsel and after doing a highly regulated genomics company, I learned that, you know, as an academic, the worst thing the urban can do is not give you money. okay oh they don't renew my grant oh they're so bad oh my god NSF isn't renewing my grant but once you take off the dot EDU hat and you're you put on the dot com hat well now the the state can just shut you down arbitrarily there's there is no there's really almost no limit to what they can do and and this is something which people who are not entrepreneurs in a regular industry do not understand the close The most analogy I can give is as follows.

Think about, you know, you guys have flown recently, right? Yeah. Okay, all the time. Okay. So for the last 20-odd years, we've had this thing called the TSA. And you go to the airport and you stand in line and you make no jokes. Okay? There's no jokes that are made, okay?

Because a joke will get you pulled out of line, you might miss your flight, right? And you certainly don't protest because the monetary penalty of a few hundred dollars of a lost flight or, you know, the meeting on the other end. enough to deter you from protesting. Okay. But you go through the metal detectors and you're essentially under TSA jurisdiction for the duration of this time and then you exit and you're out on their side and it's an annoyance, but it's tolerable, right? Okay. Now apply that analogy to entering a regulated industry. You are going into a security line. Okay. If you criticize the regulator or make jokes, you are going to be subject to

a retaliatory wait time that will not be like a missed flight and a few hundred dollars. It will be like a missed regulatory approval and millions of dollars in a dead company. And once you actually go through that metal detector apparatus and you file, you are under the jurisdiction for the life of the company. And you can't protest and you can't say anything. And so no signals get out. It's like a black hole that captures all information because anybody who was to protest would just get knee-capped silently in many different ways, right?

And, you know, the thing about that is you can, there's a great book, by the way, called Reputation and Power by Daniel Carpenter. And this is a book by somebody who's actually much more sympathetic, for example, to the FDA than I am. And, you know, the thing about it is the FDA has good aspects. It has bad aspects. But I don't think that those are really disgust in public because, When's the last time we elected the commissioner of the FDA? The answer is never, right?

Okay. You know, so many positions in the federal government are not elected. They're appointed via Plumboch positions, which is a small fraction, or they have career tenure because they're actually federal bureaucrats. It's like 90-something percent of these positions. And so people don't really actually understand the government under which we live, the actual operation. Like a lot of attentions on electoral politics, much less on like the permanent bureaucracy

and how draft guidances and guidances and so on. These are not things that go through Congress, right? These are things that are very much at the discretion of a bureaucrat in Silver Spring. And moreover, they don't just apply to the United States. Do you know what harmonization is? Harmonization, so in the same way that a small website will outsource or login to Facebook or Google, a small country will often outsource a regulation to the United States of America, that's called harmonization. And so this person in Washington, D.C. or Silver Spring or whatever, Maryland, right?

That's where I grew up. Is it? Okay. Bethesda. Great. So, nice place or whatever. So this person who is, they have career tenure as a federal bureaucrat, right? They were not elected and can't be fired. And so they're not accountable by either an electoral or a market theory of accountability. So whether you subscribe to either of those, and I think there's arguments for both, they're not accountable on either of those dimensions, right? You can't vote them out of office,

and they're also not accountable to the market. But they can put out a draft guidance or guidance that binds not just companies in the United States, but around the world. That's really crazy. Okay. And that's like talk about a choke point of centralization. It's actually like a remarkably important thing. And that's not just the FDA, that's the FAA, that's the SEC, that's the entire kind of alphabet soup, right? And we're not talking about like small things. We're talking about things like stem cells. We're talking about truly world transforming innovations where a slight change in policy can

actually make a huge difference. One way of understanding this as an entrepreneur, when you're optimizing a funnel, you can change the font and lose 20% or gain 20%. We know small changes like that can make a massive difference in conversions. So if you add three years to a process, a number is just picked out of a hat, it could be like just deadly to that entire sector. And the absence of feedback from the industry, there is no correct a mechanism, right? So this is certainly not the only problem with these sectors, but I think it's a very underreported and underappreciated one,

where actually the crypto community is in many ways kind of like one of the best communities for criticizing this stuff, right? Because the difference with crypto, actually before it, I would say Uber and Airbnb and and PayPal and what have you. Those folks, Uber and Airbnb, were going and fighting regulations at the state and local level. And as such, they had exit. Because if you run to problems in Austin,

you can monetize in Chicago. And if you run to problems in L.A., you can monetize in Atlanta or whatever, right? You have a bunch of different cities. And so, you know, each of them, you know, the funds from one place can pay the lawyers to fight somewhere else. And you're not just, like, knocked out, right?

It's not federally regulated. Once you start talking about, you know, biotech or aviation or markets like the SEC or whatever, you're talking about federal regulation. At that point, if you want to apply that same exit strategy, you have to think internationally. You have to think the U.S. and Germany and Singapore and this and that. And in fact, that's what people do. They go and do stem cells in Germany or Singapore because since the Bush administration, that's been hard to do, unfortunately, in the United States, right?

So, recursing back up, there's much more I could say on regulation. actually have a, there's a paper that I wrote six years ago that I haven't published, but I just kind of internally circulated that I may republish at Nakamoto, called Regulation is Information. Okay, and just to linger on that, product quality is a digital signal. I want to be absolutely clear that people want regulated marketplaces. They do, because they don't want to have to go and evaluate every product themselves. You don't want to go to Starbucks and have to take a dipstick and go and test every single thing,

just see if you're being arsenic poisoned or whatever. Instead, what people want is to kind of do one evaluation de facto of a regulator or a regulatory regime. Oh, the U.S. has decent product quality. I'm going to just opt into that because I know people aren't dying or whatever from that. They kind of buy at that level, right? And you want to kind of do one diligence on the regulator and then just kind of trust after that point, right? That's the optimal transaction thing. And what the regulator is delivering to you as a product is basically A, on some form of star ratings, and B, some form of bands of bad actors. And those are different, right?

Star ratings are like on a one to five scale. This person tried and they may have made a bad product or a good product. Bands of bad actors, those are zero star actors. The difference is a one star rating is someone who is well-intentioned but didn't do it right. A zero-star rating is an actual, like, fraudulent actor who may be highly intelligent but trying to pull one over, right? What's really interesting and fascinating is there's a lens on the internet, which says that the most valuable companies the last 20 years have actually.

actually all being cloud rather than land regulators. What do I mean by that? Google is a regulator of the web. They rank, right, and they filter out malware, right? eBay is a regulator of their own marketplace. They have star ratings and they filter out bad actors. PayPal does the same thing. They have internal, you know, kind of thing which they filter out, you know, the malware, right? Airbnb and Uber have star ratings. The App Store has star ratings, and they also filter out malware. And so on and so forth. If you start looking at any large assembly of humans, what the most valuable tech companies have done is they've put into place effectively international digital regulatory regimes that are actually more responsive in many ways than their national land-based

precedence, right? Just to give one concrete example of that, if you think about Uber versus taxi medallions, you know, a taxi medallion is renewed like maybe every six months. You come in for an inspection. You know what you don't get in a taxi medallion review? You don't have every ride GPS tracked. You don't have every driver's payment information. and reviews. You don't have like, you know, like granular ratings of like the, you know, the car, you know, was it clean and stuff like that? You don't have any of that information. And so, you know, like, it's maybe better than nothing. You make sure that that driver's not a criminal and they're not going to just hijack you. That's why people had yellow cabs in the

press place. A lot of these regulations arose for a reason that there were, you know, fraudulent actors, bad actors. Well, and not to interrupt, but the medallion is also a capital commitment. Yes. Which is a strong disincentive against misbehavior. That's right. Though, of course, that itself got abused in the sense of people started turning that into a business and loans and you have like kind of usurious loans on these poor immigrant cab drivers or whatever, right?

But the net is if you compare Uber and Lyft as a regulatory regime versus, you know, the tax medallions, well, every ride is GPS tracked. And every driver and rider rates each other. And the driver knows the rider can pay and the rider is forced to pay. and so on and so forth. It's like, it's just better on many, many, many different dimensions. Like in the event of like some, you know, a driver would not take the long way around. Why? You're looking at GPS. You can see that that's the shortest way. There's like 15 different ways in which this is a better regulatory regime than what came before.

But here's the interesting bit. The new model is actually a hybrid of the regulator and the marketplace. And that regulatory marketplace hybrid competes against another one. hybrid competes against lifts, right? And that's actually a new paradigm where you have, you know, it actually goes back to like libertarian theory. It's called polycentric law, if you've heard that term. Polycentric law means multiple different legal regimes that exist at the same X comma Y location, at the same latitude and one institute. And, you know, this has been historically thought of as some lunatic libertarian thing. How could you have that, you know, if you have multiple

laws, all fight each other? But guess what? We actually achieve that on your phone, where you can opt into different taxi regulatory regimes with a tap of a button, which is really interesting and cool, right? And so you've radically reduced exit cost, like, you know, oh, I'm using Uber today, lift the other day. And if one of them were really poor at the tradeoffs that you make in regulation, you just wouldn't use it, right? If they let a lot of criminals on the platform, you would just like opt out of that and go to the other one. Or if they were too harsh on drivers, the price would be too high and you would go back, right? There's a thousand tradeoffs that are made, and those are all just really expressed in kind of price signals and quality signals,

and you can just move back and forth. All right, let me pause there, get your thoughts. Yeah, I mean, I feel like the natural response of this is, I love this concept for sure. However, if Uber is to succeed, and if you look at their strategy, they are probably intent on doing this, it involves basically monopolizing transportation

and creating the most powerful network and forcing out lift and so on. Doesn't that kind of impair the ability of a genuine competitive landscape? to actually emerge? Well, every individual company will try to do that. But I think, I mean, you know, we've got all these micro mobility startups now. We've got, you know, scooters and we've got, you know, the, what I'm going to call it's the bikes, right? And we obviously Uber and Lyft are still competitors that have been around for a while. And then overseas, there's Grab and D.D. And, you know,

like, I'm not, I'm not a complete efficient markets guy by any means. But, I'm also not, you know, the alternative of having the state step in, I actually do think sometimes it's good to tolerate a period of anarchy. Let me give you a concrete example of that. Email spam, right? Email spam for a long time was a really big problem in like the late 90s or early 2000s. And there are lots of different proposals for it. And in fact, there's like a checklist that was circulated. Like your plan for spam will not work because it proposes, check a vigilante approach, this approach, that approach, et cetera, right? And eventually, because none of the, like, state-based models really worked, people developed Bayesian, you know, the Bayesian approach, right,

where you take a bunch of signals on the emails and you're able to sort them. And Gmail's mail filtering is pretty good, right? It managed to get it done, right? And so, so essentially by tolerating a period of anarchy, you developed a technological solution that was actually superior. and that actually was wealth creating overall. You sort of have to, you wait for people to punch it out, and you tolerate that period, and then the market solution comes in, right? So that's not something that's like a blind efficient market thing that says, oh, it'll correct itself immediately, right?

But it's also not something that says the state jumps in right away. It says tolerate a period of anarchy, and maybe it'll get better because there's incentives for it. Go ahead. I was just going to say the one other hindrance I can think of would be a feedback loop with the winner gaining a, of runaway advantage in ride-sharing, for instance, if Uber has the best model for self-driving. Right, right. And, you know, the thing is, it's very, it's rare that I'm persuaded by a monopoly argument,

and the reason being monopolies carry within them civilizational diabetes. Okay, let me explain what I mean by that. Have you heard the saying shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations? Okay. What it basically means is there's a person, they work themselves up, they become wealthy. Their son or their daughter inherits some of that, but they still have some of the work ethic. And their grandson or granddaughter is just a completely dissolute trust fund baby who's never known hardship and just spends it all down and does cocaine or whatever, right? Okay.

And it's called shirt sleeves, shirt sleeves in three generations. Okay. And, you know, what I call it is civilizational diabetes where too much abundance takes away the drive. I don't think you can get to infinity unless you know what zero is. And if you've just been put on third base, people feel a lot of guilt for that, right? It's like the achievement is taken away. And, you know, this is actually something where I think maybe in the future, maybe 20 or 30 years, trust fund kids who want to avoid that will go Satoshi.

Like they will just build up under their pseudonym and try to prove themselves under a pseudonym so that they know that, you know, being a Hilton or a Dole or whatever wasn't helping them, right? There's actually this interesting movie about this called Born Rich by, I think his name is Jamie Johnson, the heir of the Johnson and Johnson family, where he kind of basically talks about his guilt about having lots of money, right? Of course, those folks who have that guilt also have a big platform and their unique problems are not the problems of most other people. And so they kind of push a certain form of guilt over wealth creation because they didn't create the wealth, and that's actually not what they want to project, or what we want to project to 99% of the

population. Okay. So how does that extend to monopolies? Well, that monopoly just generates tons and tons of money, and that money attracts parasites, folks who, in a weird, rational kind of way, they want to do maximum compensation for minimum effort. These are the late adopters, right? These are the, you know, like the, actually the folks who are very different from the Silicon Valley culture,

who have come into Silicon Valley in big numbers or the last five years, right? Because they're not interested in technology per se necessarily, but they are interested in money, right? Okay. So those folks come in and that huge amount of wealth now starts getting eaten from within by termites. And so it kind of takes care of itself. So there's an institutional rot that sets in almost inevitably. That's right. And now, you know, people can argue with this as to how long,

that monopoly or whatever is in the sun and how like founder driven is, how ruthless it is. But it's like when you're actually running one of these companies, it's really, really, really hard to make a giant company keep innovating because you have cash, right? But what people don't on the outside realize is this is a machine which is set up to like mine a particular kind of ore, right? And, you know, okay, you're just crushing it on like platinum mining, okay? Oh, guess what? I don't know. Cobalt mining or diamond mining is shooting up. Or maybe it's forestry, which is actually quite different. And now you have to reconfigure this machine and all the people in it to like go in mind this totally different thing, which is a totally, you know, that's not that easy to do. And it's a metaphor, but it gives a sense of it's not just, oh yeah, just turn this thing around and just start chopping trees with it. It's actually very difficult to do. An example of this is Zuck's pivot in 2012. People take this totally for granted, but the pivot in 2012, from desktop to mobile was a 90-degree bet the company make it happen extremely difficult thing

because they had to rethink the entire UX of Facebook for a mobile app and they'd actually gotten it wrong for two years because they had bet on HTML 5 rather than native apps Android and iOS. So the mobile experience was terrible. By 2012 it was clear that like iPhone and Android which transforming the world, they had made the wrong bet on mobile. They were behind. They had zero mobile revenue at the time of IPO, the stock tanked from like, you know, like 60% drop or whatever it was. Everyone was yelling at Zuck. And just Nietzsche and Will to Power, he figured out how to, and got the right teams to ship not just a good mobile app, a great one, rethink the entire experience, turn Facebook into a mobile first company, get ad units that worked on mobile. Again,

not a gimmee at all. And then boom, like three years ago, it's like 80% of their business. So like, you know, and that's like not easy to do. And so most companies, without, exceptional leadership, just their time as monopolies is actually much more limited than people outside, I think. Probably possible in that case because the leadership was so unilateral at Facebook, so he could accumb the institutional inertia. Absolutely. That's right. And I think, you know, one of the reasons for this is unless you're the founder, there's rare examples, right? Like, Elon is not actually the founder of Tesla, right? Right. But let's say unless you are a founder, which I think encapsulates that. Like that is say you have the

charisma or legitimacy of a founder, even if you're not the founder. So unless you're a founder, it's extremely difficult to make a company do something that was not already doing, especially if it's an at-scale operation, because everybody's reflexes are wired to do a certain thing. And you're telling them, hey, that's actually wrong. We're doing this instead. Like, it's a rewiring in so many different ways. And this is people, this is not a novel observation. People call it the innovator's dilemma or what have you. But unless you've actually being at a senior level as an executive in one of these giant companies, they're fragile, much more fragile than people realize from the outside. As you're speaking, I was just about to say this has a little bit of a Clay Christensen-esque type of

vibe to it. If you think about the crop of companies out there and the different industries, for innovator's dilemma, what does, what do crypto assets tilt at? What type of companies are in the crosshairs right now? That's a great question. So I have a saying, which is Crypto is going to disrupt tech, like tech has disrupted everything else. And what I mean by that is the move from desktop software to the internet software in the early 2000s was first poo-pooed. Like a bunch of people just thought it was nonsense. There's a term like Java applets. That was what came before Ajax, right?

So people were trying to do web applications in like the late 90s and early 2000s and just the tech wasn't there yet, right? It's kind of like scaling blockchains or whatever, very, very similar conceptually. And it took the best company on the internet, Google, to do Gmail and Google Maps. And it only did in like 2004 and 2005. And that sure everybody was like, holy cow, you really can build these amazing native-like experiences on the web. That was like five years, four or five years after the dot-com crash and required the absolute best company on the internet to do it. So it wasn't an easy thing to do. And their culture, they had to nail a bunch of things.

because there's a lot of wrong turns. One wrong turn was Yahoo's wrong turn, where they were a content company, they became a content and media company because they were headed by a Hollywood guy who knew how to do that, and he didn't know the internet stuff. Like, whatever, no offense,

people make different wrong decisions or right decisions. History, though, showed that that was the wrong decision and the right decision was to be a pure tech company, which is what Google was. And lots of folks bet wrong in different ways. Google was pragmatically intranet. They used the internet, but they didn't use the internet

in a dumb way, they used it for the things that internet was good for. They weren't too early. They weren't trying to do like, you know, web van or things like that. They're doing search, right? Okay. The reason I bring that up is many of the desktop companies in the 90s did not make the transition to the internet era, right? There's a few that did. Those are actually really great, great companies, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Intuit, like some of them did, right? But like Borland or what have you, like, I'm not sure Borland is around. I haven't heard them in a long time, but they were a big deal in like the early 90s at a compiler. They didn't make that transition. And I kind of think, there's a lot of tech companies that are just going to get killed by crypto

over the next 20 years. I think it was going to take 10, 20 years, things are going to get killed. And the reason is there's so many different areas that crypto gives you tools to attack. Okay, let me name some of them. So social networks and two-sided marketplaces, many, many different kinds of tools because crypto gives you identity. It gives you balances. It gives you built-in encryption. It gives you property rights because you can hold things locally, you know. It gives you the ability to sign contracts. It gives you governance, right?

All of those types of things are things which are people are complaining about in different ways on existing social networks. I think we're going to see a total cycling of social networks. Maybe the big ones, Facebook and Twitter will exist, but there's going to be lots of different unbundlings and theses on them, right? In the future, I mentioned this might be a million hubs and a billion spokes of social networking. So you have all these different kinds of smaller networks, but 1,000 to 10,000, 100,000 people. But that's like a city, right? That's like living in a city. You live in SF or whatever, it's 700,000 people.

We can have like lots of networks of that size, right? And then that's kind of a culture and it's on which you hang out in. Like crypto Twitter is not 100,000 people. It's like a thousand pugilists in the arena, right? Boxing. I think it might be 50,000 people. Sure. Well, well, I mean on Twitter?

Yeah. Oh, well, so what I mean is like the voices, right? Like the folks who you hear from or whatever, it's like high one or whatever. That's like a thousand people, right? Less, yeah, less, right? XRP Army has more than that. How many people are? Do you guys people, right?

Exactly, give me of people, right? So, okay, so one aspect is social networks two side of marketplace. Another is fintech, right? So one liner I've used since 2013 or whatever is crypto is good for transactions that are very large, very small, very fast, very automated, very international. or very transparent, right? Did you coin that? Yeah. It's a lot of stuff.

It's good, right? Yeah. It's good, right? Yeah. So that's, I put that on, like, there's some talk that I had in 2013, 2014, where I've had that. But I should probably blog all this stuff and just timestamp it or whatever, right? Yeah, stay your claim to that for us. Okay, great. So, you know, one of the things is with Nakamoto, which we'll come to, I finally have the time to just write.

It's not something where Twitter has always just been a, hobby of mine. It's never being like my most important thing or whatever, like content creations never mean my most important thing. So now what I need to do is I've got like literally like 100, 150 blog posts in different like layers levels. I just need to like knock them all out, right? But all right, let me come to this one. So that like kind of one liner, transactions that are very large, very small, very fast, very international, very automated or very transparent. That gives a rubric for things that crypto is good at, that the existing system is not good at. And my kind of rule of thumb is if your thing checks two or three of those boxes,

I think you can build a transformative application with crypto. Whereas if it doesn't, then you should just use Fiat. I'll give you a concrete example. Everybody talks about coffee, coffee, coffee, buying point of sale with crypto. Why? Because actually, it's one of the few things you actually buy every day. There's not that many other things you buy every day. Consciously buy.

Whip back your credit card and buy, right? It's like people's daily drug habit. That's what America used to run on tobacco and alcohol. now it runs on caffeine and, you know, whatever, meth. Okay, fine. So the, I'm not making the light of meth epidemic. It's just, you know, it's abundant now, unfortunately. So the, what's the point? The point is that that daily purchase of coffee is uppermost in people's minds when they think about transactions. And it's actually true. Starbucks is a massive, you know, volume player in transactions, right? However, those transactions are neither very large nor very small.

It's not a million dollars. It's not a fraction of SIM. They're not international because you and the barista are like right there right they don't need to be very automated because it's like you're handing the thing you're not doing like a thousand transactions to different people it doesn't have to be very transparent like you're you don't have to broadcast the fact that this transaction happened to other people and it also doesn't need to be like incredibly fast like it doesn't have to be like a you know an API call where it's a millisecond and you're transmitting a small amount of money back for the for the API call it can take like you know a minute

or not a minute but you know whatever it is is reading, do not remove card, whatever that is, 15 seconds, right? Okay. So point of sale actually does not satisfy any of these criteria. And that's why it's a bad application for it. In fact, I would analogize it to VoIP. So in the early days of the internet, everybody thought about telephony as a great application for the internet. Why? Because that was a form of information that people used all the time. But what's interesting is the internet analogy can also be used. The internet is good for transmitting information that is very large, very small, very fast, international, very automated. So gigantic files, tiny files, right? Files that have to be chopped

up and sent and received by a program, files that are sent across borders, right? Files that have to be like broadcast publicly and so on, right? What the internet was not actually amazing for in the early days was making a telephone call, which is a mezzanine amount of information, and they're very large and very small. You got it. The phone system worked for it, right? And when telephony actually started work, it was for Skype where it was international calls, right? So it was actually significant. And it was also international goals were very expensive at that time. So you actually picked an application the current system couldn't do, right? You went and exited, you know, and so on, right? It took like 30 years from the protocol standard being invented to Skype, actually. Yeah, exactly.

That's right. So that I think, like, telephony is, and VoIP is sort of like point of sale. I think point of sale will eventually work in crypto, but it's not like the number one. If you were to list the top 10 applications internet, I don't know, maybe VoIP today would make the top 10, but it would definitely not be number one, right? It'd probably be like search, social, like e-commerce, you know, cloud, you know, like deployments and so on, like machine learning, like everything with the iPhone, all the location-based stuff, ride sharing, you know, all that are stuff, right? And VoIP is important. I'm not saying it's not, but it's definitely not undisputed number one, right? Okay. So the kinds of things that worked on the early internet were like Amazon and Google, right, where they were

bandwidth optimized. They were optimized for very low bandwidth because early internet was 56K or 288 modems, right? So you just showed a webpage and you had, you're sending like small bytes back and forth, like one click, right? Okay, or like type in a word and hit enter and just get back one web page. So it was optimized for very low bandwidth

and fat things on the other side. And those are the applications that are working today in crypto. For example, hodling is a great application for a highly bandwidth constrained environment. You know why? Because you're buying and you're hodeling. That's it.

Pretty simple. Yeah, exactly. Your transaction volume, you don't need to scale. Your transaction volume is one transaction every five years. Right. Okay. You know, right? So that's a very good application for like an extremely bandwidth constrained environment, right? And, you know, we're starting to see folks using this for wire transfer equivalence and other things within crypto. Large transactions. Yeah, large transactions, right? Like one thing I mentioned a while back is the applications are here. We just don't have metadata on Block Explorer labels.

Right? Like basically, if you knew the edge. label of every transaction in the Bitcoin blockchain, you could be like, oh, that is, you know, that's a wire. Oh, that's a purchase at an exchange. Oh, you know, that's just a movement from one wallet to another and so on and so forth, right? Now, there's companies like chain analysis that are actually like applying that kind of information. And obviously there's a predator prey thing where you often don't want to disclose that, right? And there's privacy issues and so on and so forth. My main point, though, is billions of dollars is being moved every day and some fraction that we know is not just pure trading, we just don't know what it's being used for.

Right? And I think that's an interesting perspective on it because one thing I think about crypto that's interesting, I wrote an op-ed on this two years ago, but I think it still holds up. I'll probably republish it. Have you ever seen the Monty Python skit where he's like, you know, what are the Romans ever done for us? He's like, the aqueducts, you know, and he's like, the roads, you know, and he's like, yeah, well, except for that.

What else have they done, right? Okay. So what are the applications of crypto? Okay, so there's digital gold. That's there. It's like, okay, what about, all right, fine, digital gold. Well, you know, you can now send international wire transfers to anybody else who also values crypto. And you can send it much faster than a bank.

I mean, like it's much faster than a wire transfer. You can hit refresh. And within 60 seconds, you can see the thing on the blockchain. If you're sending, you know, Ethereum or, you know, even Bitcoin, you can, it'll take 10 minutes or. Yeah. But you see the unconfirmed transactions. You see the unconfirmed transactions. And that's amazing because it increases the metabolism of business.

The difference between two to three days versus like a minute is the difference between a postal mail and an email. And what hasn't happened yet is for business to catch up to that metabolism. But let me give you a concrete example of where that's valuable. So with Earn.com, we would take in an Ethereum or Bitcoin, we would talk to somebody on the phone or in chat. And it would send us that amount in crypto, right? And we just like wait for them, you know, make small talk, refresh. boom, it's live, it's in our account. Then we could hit enter, and with confidence

knowing that we had the money, send like, let's say we got in $10,000 worth of ether or whatever, right? So we could send $10,000 worth of emails, $10 to 1,000 people because our supply chain had cleared. We weren't essentially sending them credit, if that makes any sense, right?

They wouldn't default on it, right? And so that just increases the metabolism of business because they could pay for a large international transaction and have it clear same day and then see the results in their dashboard within a few minutes, right? And that gives you a sense of the kinds of applications that are enabled by much, much faster settlement times, right? Which is very different than anything that existed without that. All right. Third example is, so what was it was? It was like incorporation. There were, oh gosh, there's one that I thought was also at scale.

Digital gold, wire transfers. Like capital market. crowds. Crowdfunding. Yeah. Right. So. I had a feeling you're going to say that. Yeah.

Well, here's why. So 2015, if you go to Wikipedia's page of the largest crowd funds, it was something like Star City or whatever. I was going to say Star Citizen. Yeah, Star Citizen. And that was funny because it like resembles an ICO. And they didn't deliver anything. There's a lot of disappointment.

That's a lot of disappointment. That's right. But one thing I think is often interesting is to take a step back from it and forget about what was being funded. And just look at the mechanism of funding, right? Basically, you know, a large crowd fund online in 2015 was $10 or $15 million. That was like a big, big deal. Star Citizen was really momentously big.

Yes. And then it was totally eclipsed by ICS. Exactly. That's right. And the thing is, like, people, if you graphed what the biggest one was, it went up 400X in two years. From 10 or 15 million, it was the biggest one, to like $4 billion for EOS, right? Now, I recognize there's 50 things that can be said. I don't want to diss anybody or what have you, right?

Like, I actually think there's legit. I think, yes, is trying and has done some legitimate things or whatever have you. I don't want to attack or whatever anybody, okay? But what I will say is regardless of what you think about a particular project, right, simply the remarkable achievement of transforming international crowdfunding is a very big history-making deal. Because what happened was Kickstarter, you have to have like American credit cards and an American mail order form and you can only accept money from the U.S. And it takes time to settle. And the amounts are limited basically to whatever your credit card fraud protection limits are and so on and so forth.

Right. Whereas in crypto, just like the door is ripped off the hinges. Any amount pretty much from anywhere at any time. Like Brave raised like $35 million in 30 seconds. Yeah. Right? That is awesome. And it was an emergent property.

It wasn't what Ethereum was built for. Yeah, well, that's right. That's right. And so essentially, that is something where that's a 100x improvement over the current system. And that's only one of the 100xes we've delivered, right? Like crypto is delivered. Digital gold is like a thousand X improvement over the current system. International wire transfers, you go from two to three days down to a minute.

That's, again, a quantifiable 100x, right? And I've got a table of all these 100xes that I'm going to put out there, which is like crypto isn't a single 10x. It's like a bunch of 100xes. Right. So, you know, when you have a bunch of 100 X's, that is something which is a root and branch thing that just eats away at the underpinnings and the justification for many existing industries until one day just all start toppling, right? Because, you know, something that was interesting is in the early days of the internet, early days of hacker news, if you go back and reread this, lots of people would say things like, oh, another like SaaS, you know, application before the term SaaS was common. Great. You just made a dumb, slow version of a desktop app. Good job, clap, clap, like the dunk tweet kind of attitude.

And what they didn't get was, well, everybody can collaborate on this app. Like, you know, your state is the same, right? You can all log in and save your files in one place. You don't have to send them back and forth in attachments. And they were caught up on the things that were worse, that the performance was worse, that the U.X was clunkier, you know, all that type of stuff. And they couldn't understand the things that were better. One of the versions of this, and this is something that I've got an essay coming out about on this.

A common example is people are like, oh, blockchains, they're just a slow database, right? And that's true. It is true that they are a, like, depending on how you benchmark it, a thousand or 10,000 X slower than the equivalent post-crust thing. But you know what they're 1,000X better on among the other dimensions I've already mentioned? They're massively multi-client databases. Okay. So if you run a website, you are not usually allowing anybody to have full read and write access

to every table in that database. Instead, you have a very limited set of API calls, and people cannot read the entire table. You cannot pull Twitter's database or what have you, right? You can't even get it for read access, level on right access. The incredible thing about a blockchain is everybody has complete read access to everything, number one, and anybody can write for a fee, denominy the native token. And the cryptography and the mining keeps all of that, you know, fine, the consents out of you would find. That's incredible.

you now have gone from one root user to basically N, unlimited root users. So yeah, you went down in speed 1,000x, but you increase the number of simultaneous clients at 1,000x. And when we are thinking about that, you know who the simultaneous clients of the Bitcoin blockchain are. In addition to every hodler, right, Binance is a client, and Coinbase is a client, and Cracken as a client, and so on and so forth. We're all collaborating by reading and writing to the same database.

It is a massive innovation in shared state. This is actually something where you know, you talk to an AWS guy, right? And you look at infrastructure diagrams. And they've got, you know, the load balancer and they've got, you know, your data warehouse and what have you. But the piece that's actually missing is something that talks about shared state between different economic actors, right? Different AWS accounts. You know, how do you share state between, you know, like Dropboxes stuff and Stripe stuff or whatever? Why would they ever want to do that?

Well, Bitcoin shows that Coinbase and Binance and finance and. and Square and everybody else who's got Bitcoin in their applications are all actually reading and writing to the same shared database. There's something there, right? And actually there's way more than that. Facebook login shows that identity is something that people wanted to share database.

Oh, and Twitter, well, lots of people want to write APIs with that. And you start seeing actually the shared database problem is a very big deal. And the way that it's dealt with now is like data export and import, like export, you know, JSON or export, you know, CSV. CSV is actually as silly as it sounds. CSV is like the closest thing in some ways to what blockchains provide because you can export a table and then sometimes reimport it into an app, right?

Like you can export from Excel and reimport it into Google. That's shared state between Microsoft and Google. But it's pretty crappy, right? It's like not ideal. I love CSV. Sure, sure, sure, sure. The, my main point on this, just going all the way back up, is what kinds of things can cryptic grow after? So I start with the 10xes and 100xes, right? So we've already hit gold. We've hit crowdfunding. hit wires, we hit number of simultaneous clients, but there's more. It's like speed of incorporation. You know, you go from days or whatever with Delaware to seconds or minutes with a smart contract. Although we still have a lot of work to do there. Of course. Of course. But the fundamental idea of having a transparent set of laws on chain, let me give you an interesting, you know,

quasi-political motivation for this. Right now, we're an era of rising nationalism and tariffs and trade wars. And that is inhibiting, you know, commerce between countries. And if you subscribe to the viewpoint that economic ties between countries are good because they deter war, this is actually bad, right? Now, one way, if you subscribe to that. I was going to say, there's a lot of counter-exemptals. That's right. But there's an if-then argument which basically says, you know, like you're doing more economic damage to yourself if you're fighting somebody. It's better, you know, this is the libertarian peace kind of argument, like economic, you know, is better than war. Okay. But an interesting thing is as much as there's trade barriers between Chinese and Americans and other folks and so on,

there are a lot of folks who are effectively on the same cap table when it comes to a crypto asset. Because that is something where the rule of law is on chain and it is an international rule of law. Like an American may not trust a Chinese court and like a Chinese person may not trust an American court, right? especially like, you know, so recently this lady was stopped in Canada, the Huawei CFO, right? Yeah. Yeah. So like, you know, the Chinese have some reason to distrust the American system. Like that, that, that, that, and the Lebanese may not trust a Japanese court. Exactly. That's right. So there's, there's increasingly the Carlos Gosen thing, right? Yeah. So there's an increasing degree of potentially legitimate distrust of a foreign court system or so on.

I think that's bad. And I think crypto is actually a solution, not to get all like wishy-wash on it, but I do believe in, you know, like the brotherhood of man and woman, you know, like, like in the sense of cross-border trade, it is good. It is like Silicon Valley has taken people from all over the world and put them together to build things like Google and Facebook and Dropbox and what have you. And that is actually good, you know, I think. And crypto can scale that concept. That's another thing crypto does 100 or 1,000x. A cap table, you know, the cap table is arguably the most important data structure in Silicon Valley. That's apologist or whatever. And it's kind of funny because it's not like you're writing to that or reading to that a lot. It's not like, you know, some fancy

thing like a skip list or or a TRI, a tree or whatever. It's an Excel table, basically, right? But it's taken people, you know, you can take Persians, Brazilians, Eastern Europeans, Vietnamese, Indians, whatever, right? And of course, you know, Americans, Canadians, and, you know, a few hundred people on a cap table can build Google. That's amazing, right? You align all these people, all these strangers, right, who are not related to each other by blood, right? can get behind something and build it that benefits everybody. And crypto, at its best, can increase the scale of those cap tables by a thousand or 100,000 X from aligning a few hundred people to hundreds of thousands of people or millions of people.

And if that alignment, if those cap tables built, you know, all these amazing companies, what can we do with what comes after, right? So will these sovereign individuals end up building actual countries and government, you think? So let me give an asterisk on that. I'm sympathetic to the sovereign individual thesis. In fact, I like the book quite a lot. But what I think increasingly about is the sovereign collective. And the reason for that is humans are pack animals.

There are some folks who really want to go and live on a ranch, you know, or whatever by themselves. Fine. You know, more power to them, knock yourself out. That's great. But it took me a while to articulate this, but I think the tech ethos, again, at its best, I'm not talking about the Johnnycombe lately's who are, you know, the folks who are joining tech companies for the money over the last, you know, five or ten years. But like, at its best, it's about win and help win, not live and let live.

And the thing that's interesting is win and help win is a tech ethos, but I would argue it's neither progressive nor conservative nor libertarian. And let me explain why. Many progressives would deny that it's possible to win and help win. Like they would say, ah, you're, you getting rich means someone else becomes poor, right? Like, not all, but many would, many conservatives would, many would, many conservatives would, like, you know, they say there's, there's a zeal about like win and help win, which is not, oh, I'm happy in a small town and staying at home and what have you, right? And I'm not trying to caricature, I'm just saying like, not all, not all folks who

cheer small town life and stability and what have you are zealous and ambitious enough to try to change the world. That's kind of a different kind of attitude. And the libertarian of live and let live is just isolated pockets of individuals, right? So win and help win kind of is ambitious, it's positive sum, and it is collective. And it's kind of different from the other three ideologies, right? And, you know, again, nothing against that. And you can argue in caricaturing it and so on. And I mean, don't disrespect anybody who, who, you know, believes in any of those creeds. but I think win and help win also out-competees these other ideologies because it generates more wealth, it generates wealth for a group. Those folks help each other.

And it is also the staging is important, right? You win so that you have resources and then you help others win. So you're not like on the hook to help others win before you have something to give them, right? Like it's not like draining your life force before you've built yourself up. You have to have to have control of yourself first before you can really help. help others. I think that's an important concept. You know, whatever. Jordan Peterson's thing, clean your room, right? Okay. The, okay, we're cursing backup. So how did I get on Women and Helpland? It was a, I was putting a sovereign individual. That's right. That's right. So the

sovereign individual is great. However, I feel that a sovereign collective is going to be a lot more powerful. For example, about 20,000 Amazon, you know, when I was doing HG2, about 20,000 engineers worth was enough to bring New York State to the bargaining table. That's actually remarkable, right? New York State is like a 27 million person state. Why did they care about 20,000 people? Well, those folks were probably disproportionate revenue stream had they come there, and a bunch of other states went in bid. So this is something that's very counterintuitive for people. Something less than 0.1% of the population, if it's liquid, can actually dramatically change law. And that, I think, is one of the biggest things that's going to start happening in the 2020s,

not digital nomad, but digital nomadic tribes, right? Groups who we group online, right, you find your community, and you start collectively bargaining with states, right, or cities or towns or what have you. And there's various drivers of this. First premise is law is a function of latitude and longitude. That is to say your X, Y location determines the local, state, and then federal overlays. And so if you shift your X, comma, y, the lower the cost of changing your X, Y location, the lower the cost of changing the law under which you live.

So election is one method of doing this. Migration, therefore, is another. You can change the law under which you live via election or migration. Which is why we've seen so much migration because it got cheaper. Because it got cheaper. It's an opportunity to fund a new jurisdiction. That's right. And you can plot a graph like Moore's Law of like the cost of relocation.

Now, one of the amazing things tech has been doing, mobile is making this more mobile. Almost everybody in tech is working on like mobile, cloud, VR, and so on. And different parts of this, they're each cutting another obligate tie to the land. Okay, let me explain. So you can now, if you want to, pick up your phone, Uber to the airport, hit some buttons, be on a plane, hit some more buttons, have a hotel, hit some more buttons, get food on their end. And then you can even like tweet or whatever on your phone.

Like, basically, you can be in another country in a day if you wanted to with very little, you know, upfront planning, right? We're coming more mobile again. Okay. After a long time of humanity being sessile. And one of the things about that is there's kind of two modes of humanity. You may know this, but there's like the hunter-gatherer mode and there's like the farmer mode. And we were hunter-gatherers for most of evolutionary history. Then we were farmers for the last whatever thousand years, depending on how you date it.

Now I think we're coming back for at least some significant fraction of humanity to a hunter-gatherer mode, right? Okay, so mobile is law as function of Latun Loditude. Mobile is making us more mobile. VR makes location irrelevant. And this is a, I don't know if you've used the Oculus Quest. It's actually pretty good. I haven't. You should get it. I mean, like, you know, I'm not like a Facebook. I am anti-anty Facebook. I'm not pro-Facebook, but I'm anti-anty Facebook in the sense of I think a lot of criticisms of Facebook are unfair criticisms. Though I also would definitely fund things to disrupt them.

that makes sense, right? Yeah, I'm a staunch not user of Facebook. Fair, right? Twitter is my sole poison jealous. Fair. So, but basically I think, you know, like, I think Oculus Quest is a good product, and I think it's like, move the future forward. So, you know, if you're anti-Facebook, fine, use HoloLens or something like that.

But I think Oculus Quest is worth trying out. The thing about VR is I think it's going to, you know, virtual reality and virtual currency this decade, I think are both going to ramp, right? So the practice goes kind of a sleeper hit over the holidays. I tweeted about that. I think it was like top 10 in the App Store for like a physical product and that's pretty, pretty good. And what VR lets you do is opt out of your X, Y, and just opt in to something else. One of the things I think people are going to do, for example, is like opt in to the 1950s.

Right? Like everybody's well dressed or whatever. Now, you know, hopefully you opt into like a tolerant version of the 1950s. I was going to say with like the gender. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right, that's right. That's right. But like, what people can do is now remix the good aspects of the modern time period,

but the things that they liked about the 1950s or the 1960s or the 1900s or larping back to some Dungeons and Dragons thing, right? Like, they can opt into other time periods and have both AIs and other people there. And then they can just skip between them like you'd skip between like a web browser and just have a totally different experience. Now, we know this is popular because World Warcraft and things like that. Fortnite are hugely popular, right? So that's another way in which the X, Y, location that you live at becomes less important. And, you know, third dimension is everything going to the cloud, right? Like, you know, for example, I can move much more easily because my books are all in my Kindle, right?

I know I'm renting them from Amazon, but I also have a lot of PDF versions. And then this heavy bookshelf, I don't need to move all the time. I've got a thousand books on my phone, right? And that's great. I've, you know, marks them all up. And, you know, one of the things I think about is actually everything that you need to pack, I do think over time, they'll be summonable from your phone. One of the things that hasn't happened yet, which I think you might start with men's suits,

is clothes. That would be great. It's already happening. It's happening, right? But basically, like, rent the runway for men where you land at another hotel and they just have a suit to your size there. You don't have to pack. We were just lamenting that there aren't ready to go podcast studios in a city. There you go.

That's right. That's right. So there should be one. I think everything like this, all the on-demand stuff, the Uber for X stuff will eventually happen. It just, it's like, you know, you had to have Twitter and Facebook and Google for your Twitter for X and Facebook for Y and Google for Z. Okay. So this is, that's part of percursing further back. This is part of why I think the sovereign collective is likely to win because I think I think that, I think that.

getting 20,000 people and getting them to move somewhere is becoming cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, thanks to all these apps. Their dependence on the current XY is less. And when your dependence is less, your leverage is more. So one question I had is like, so I'm like a orbit fan. Like I fully endorse and believe in this notion of like the patchwork and the fact that social media is the first step there because it's a deterioratorialized law. However, if you look at the laws that we are bound by, they actually seem like kind of a step backwards in terms of like, to me, Twitter, for instance, it seems like a digital fiefdom.

Like, kind of like, I feel like a surf when I'm on Twitter, you know, like a surf in like the pre-Soviet era. In that, like, I'm very much disempowered. I'm the, you know, Jack Dorsey ostensibly runs the thing, but really it's just some, you know, basically bureaucrats, which impose a very unclear law, which is like often changing. Sure. Very arbitrary.

And so it's almost worse in some respects. Like the terms of service is the law, but the law is very unclear, and there's obviously no accountability. So then, of course, you know, there's like the exit potential, but exiting something like Twitter is extremely costly. You can't bring your social graph with you. So you can't really bring the reputation you've accrued with you. you can't bring your followers with you. So is this like a sufficient hindrance to impair this idea of like these digital polities,

these like digital commons? It's great question. So let's say a few things. One is I am more sympathetic to Jack nowadays than for a few reasons. But here's one potential metaphor. He has like 300 million people on Twitter. And he's basically like the president of 20 countries, is embroiled in Civil Wars.

Oh, yeah, no, I'm a huge Jack Dorsey fan. Don't get me wrong. So, so, so, like, it's one of those things where, you know, like, Lincoln during the Civil War, he, like, suspended habeas corpus and did all kinds of crazy stuff, right? Jack, Jack pretty much can't do any of that, right? Or, like, he can censor it. Like, one group is, you know, is basically mad at him for not censoring enough, and other is mad at him for censoring too much, right?

Yeah, and so he really can't win on that. And that's why I think blue sky is very interesting, which is their attempt to decentralize Twitter. I think that's the right approach. And what's interesting about it is you can build a large coalition around it because there's, you know, there's whether, so progressives are generally against, you know, inequality and concentration of wealth and corporate power. And libertarians are often against centralization and concentration of state power or in some cases corporate power as well. And when you put those together, it's actually a concern with centralization where there is like the, you know, the meme with the handshake, you know. Like there's really something there. And, you know, I've got some investments, in fact, that I'm announcing that are starting to be collaborations between the decentralized web community and the crypto community, which really should happen.

And there's some touch points, but that really should be like, you know, like two hands together because one group is coming at it from, you know, being against corporate power. And the other group is coming against it from being against state power. But really what happens is a large enough private company becomes quasi-public. So there's a continuum between private and public power, I think. Because you have 300 million people, right? Like that's gigantic. So to answer your question, I'm actually fairly positive on this in the medium term because, A, they're doing things like decentralizing Twitter. Just one of them is enough.

Or giving lip service to it at least. Yeah. I mean, they're seriously working on it. Like, I can't say everything on it, but they're actually trying to recruit like a serious person for it and what have you. B is, I don't know if you read Zuck's letter, like Zuck actually came out pretty hard for free speech a few months ago. He did not need to do that. That was not the short-term profit-maximizing thing.

He definitely took a lot of hits for it. But I think it was the right thing to do. And he's been talking about decentralization. I mean, you know, yeah, like Libra or whatever. Again, I actually think any effort in the space is good because it attracts attention, it gets energy, it legitimates it or what have you. And then, you know, other platforms like Telegram doing tons. and, you know, the ex-Watzap guys are funding Signal, which has mobile coin.

Reddit has a crypto thing and so on. All the major social networks are actually have some crypto project. I'm not sure all of them are publicly announced, but they're all kind of thinking about it. And a lot of these folks can get aligned behind the values of crypto are the values of tech. Do you see my article like Bitcoin is a flag of tech? I saw you give the talk in NSF. Yeah, great. Yeah.

So that's actually something which I think folks can get behind that. because it fits kind of how we'd like to think of it is a fair fight, you know, like rule of law, like we don't want to, you know, push it either way, right? We want to actually, you know, strive for neutrality and strive for basically a fair fight, right? And let the idea, you know, marketplace of ideas win. So I think there's, I mean, there's a narrative that tech CEOs, you know, are evil sensors and so on. But they, like, a lot of them actually want to do the right thing. And I think you're going to see that.

decentralization of Twitter is just one piece of that. I see Jack Dorsey is a tragic figure, actually, because he, as you say, he is such a difficult job, and Twitter has so much leverage to anybody that controls it that every government on earth is desperately trying to control the dialogue through Twitter right now, either, you know, overly pressuring him or even infiltrating it, like, you know, I'm sure that some of the staff work for various, you know, state agencies. Right. So, like, I think these guys, the, you know, the Zox and the Jack Dorsey's, they probably don't want that responsibility anymore.

That's a big part of it, right? To be the great sensor, you know. So this, I mean, Vitalik had a good post on this control is liability, right? Which is a great, like, you know, one-liner. Like, essentially, if you have controlled, you're a target. So decentralization actually starts to have advantages over this, right? So I actually do think, you know, the archive history is long, but it bends towards decentralization. I do think that there's, the biggest thing about it is crypto gives an offsetting financial incentive

that compensates for the increased complexity of decentralization. That's crucial because otherwise it's just like a whole mess. And I think what's going to happen is, here's a, I thought a good analogy. I tweeted this out a while back, but we're maybe delving into. Why do you use Bitcoin, in part because you want your money to be yours, that a bank should not be able to de-platform you from your money, right? Well, if you accumulated your dollars in your bank account, you also accumulated your followers or what have you on Twitter.

And that's also an economic asset, right? That's economically valuable. Many people run their businesses off this type of stuff, whether Instagram or Twitter or whatever. And you should not be able to be deplatformed from that without due, you know, like process. This is why talk about the TOS being arbitrary. Exactly. Because people are being deprived of they mingle their labor with a handle.

that's property. That's exactly right. And so I think it's a slight shift, but I think an important rhetorical shift from talking about censorship to saying private keys are the new private property. This is my property. Yeah, it's much bigger than just censorship. It's much bigger than censorship. It's a confiscation. It's eminent domain. Exactly, right? So once it's reframe like that, because it's not purely a political thing. It's something that it's apolitical. Why would you want to trust, whether you trust the government or not, why would you want to necessarily trust a gigantic corporation with just complete discretion over whether they deprive you of your property. That's not right, you know, they're not economically aligned with you. Not only that,

but the government, like you look at the American frontier, the government lost the battle to drive, deprive settlers of their property. People settled illegally across the frontier. And then they successfully made the case for why they should retain the rights to that. Sure. So they overruled the government even. So it's a complicated one because you can say, oh, they took it from the Native Americans and so you can go back and forth on that stuff, right? But I understand the substance of the point, which is basically that thinking about this in terms of property rights, I think is the right approach, because you can start bringing a bunch of principles in there. And what's good about Bitcoin is it is pushing the re-decentralization. People are bringing their private

keys locally. Gradually, it's happening, like CASA and things like that, right? So the technology are improving. Have you seen like Zengo or else thing? It's really pretty awesome, which is like a, I don't know, Gen 3 or Gen 4 wallet that uses like your face ID as like another input signal and what have you, right? So very, very smart team out of Israel. So folks are really starting to innovate on local custody. And you know, you saw the whole thing with Peter Schiff the other day, right? Of course, yeah. Like, I know people were dunking on him, but I actually agree that... It's a very unfortunate situation. It's an unfortunate situation, that's right. Like... Blockchain not info wallet sounds like it was totally misconfigured.

Or exactly, if it logged him out and, you know, like the thing about it is it should be idiot proof. You shouldn't, you shouldn't, you know, I'm not saying shift as an idiot, but I'm saying it should not be something you have to think about or worry about it. It sounds very user hostile. I mean, I've never used it, but, you know, holding information as value by its very nature is user hostile. That's the problem. That's exactly right. And I think, you know, I'll always, you know, hold a soft spot for shift because I think he was like an early exponent of some. of the issues with the financial system and so on.

And I know he's like kind of trolls Bitcoin or whatever, but it's fine. Like I have this concept of minimum necessary alignment, which is if somebody is aligned with me on like core principles, right, I don't care about all the other differences. Like they're generally pushing in like a positive some direction, right? And I think that we can do with more of that in society. He's with Bitcoiners on like 95% of. So is right. So is Radalia, by the way.

So is Radalia. That's right. Exactly. I mean, that's the thing is, you know, the circular firing squad is just really dumb. And it's something where what I've realized, I tweeted this other day, lots of ideologies that seem to have, like, deep philosophical differences somehow all manifest in the same way on Twitter, and I call it Twitterism, right? Like, somehow they all converge.

You know how, like, in economics, they have this concept of like the solo convergence theorem? I'm not even sure if it's real, but they're like, all economies converge the same model. I'm not sure that's real in economics, but I know it's real on Twitter. Whether all economies converge to the same economy, all ideologies converge the same ideology of, you know, the sick burn, the dunk, right? The exclamation parts, like the, you know, let me get this straight, you know, that type of stuff, right? Because Twitter turns us into monsters. And what's funny is even if you actively try to not do this, the 1% of the time you are like that will be the tweet that's seen by like, like,

80% of people, right? For example, just like one example, you know, I actually, I think, I try not to be that sarcastic or whatever on my feed, but the day I tweeted something like, because I saw the NYT endorsement coming up and I was like, I just rolled my eyes. I was like, can't wait for the billion dollar company owned by millionaires to endorse the millionaire who will then condemn millionaires, billionaires, and corporations, right? That got like, you know, millions of impressions, right? What's owned by a billionaire, right, Carla Slim? I'm not sure how much of a steak he owns anymore.

But I kind of hedged it with millionaires, because for sure it's millionaires, right? And something like that is actually, I think relatively uncharacteristic of what I put out there, right? Like, you know, because usually what I use Twitter for is developing in the open? You know how people use GitHub and they put out source code? I have little snippets of ideas that are all,

you'll see them all in books or whatever, you know, later if I can get them all out there. But these snippets and I kind of get feedback on them, that's what I like Twitter for. But you'll see a fish eye lens of somebody because their most viral tweet is often like the one that's most definitive or least qualified or the most sarcastic or most atypical. And what happens is people, even if they don't realize it subconsciously respond to incentives, right? And when you have a score, like, you know within a company, right, what gets measured is what gets optimized. And, you know, here's actually something which just as a paradigm shifting thought experiment. Imagine you had, you know, two teams playing a basketball game, but the team score was never shown.

Instead, every player just looked up and saw their own points, okay, or their own rebounds or whatever, right? So what would happen? You just basically get showboating and, you know, so on and so forth, right? Like, it's just just human nature. You don't even, you don't even, you'd have to like do some mental mass to even add up the score. Maybe maybe that even wasn't shown, right? And so, you know, if everybody has a personal dashboard on Twitter, they're not really propounding an ideology, you know, if they think they are. They're just maximizing their personal likes and follows or whatever, right?

Instead, if you had some team dashboard, which actually showed some numerical figure, you know, in a company that's revenue, right, or users or something like that, you know, people aren't getting a box score of their daily stats every single day. I mean, salespeople are, and that's why they're actually there, you know, you have to kind of corral them. They're great, but, you know, they're coin operated, right? It's a typical phrase. They're different than engineers who are more long term. So you can imagine completely different user interfaces that actually had positive some ways to develop an ideology, and they didn't reduce them all to Twitterism. All right. So I guess we're pretty short

on time now, but obviously want to hear the two-minute version of your vision for Nakamoto. So basically Nakamoto.com went up, you know, a couple of weeks ago. I have gotten like almost 100 contributions, which I'm just sorting through the pile to it. There's some really awesome stuff there. Most major people in crypto are in. And what's interesting is the feedback that I got via signal, DM, telegram, email was overwhelmingly positive. And basically, there were so many folks who were like, wow, we really need this as a community is a place place to talk, like where it's not all one-upsmanship and virtue signaling and your coin sucks, blah, blah, that type of stuff. And, you know, one thing that, you know, I've got a post coming out

where I talk about this. I mean, just thinking about login mechanisms for community health and whatnot. I just want to do it in a deliberate way. But Satoshi Nakamoto never trolled anyone. Aside from Dan Larimer. Even that was something where, if you look at it in context, he's basically explaining like micropayments and he gives a citation. And it was actually like if his most trollish comment over like almost like a thousand posts over years was I don't have time to finish explaining to you. But he does give a link. Okay, that's his max. His median is very, very, right?

And the thing about it is if you go and read Satoshi stuff, he was pragmatic. I say he because he called himself a him in one, you know, of his profiles online. he was pragmatic, he was cool, he was technological, he was generally positive while, you know, reserved. Patient as well. Patient, exactly. He talked to Zucco about zero knowledge. He talked about BitDNS and going in, you know, like having multiple chains because you couldn't put all the load on one chain. He made tradeoffs like an engineer.

Now, one of the things that, you know, I think about, I actually, I tweeted this and I thought better of it afterwards, actually, which was, Satoshi should not, actually be analogized to a religious leader, like Jesus or Muhammad. That's actually the wrong analogy. And I thought about this and actually a much better analogy is Satoshi as being somebody like Newton or Einstein or Maxwell, like a scientist or an engineer like Larry Page or you know the like Ford or Edison, somebody like that, right? Like a scientist and engineer because kind of both, right? And a scientist or an engineer is definitely somebody you respect. You know, you could name Tesla or something, you know, after them. But somebody who can be wrong as well.

You don't, like, go to their writings like religious scripture. You go to their writings to write a biography of the person to give them the respect, you know, that they deserve. But, like, you know, Newton probably would have been tickled that Einstein corrected his theory of gravitation with, you know, relativistic effects. Like, that's awesome. High five, thank you for taking it one step further, right? That's how science progresses. It's not like this close-minded sort of religious thing. And so that's why we named it Nakamoto after Satoshi, the scientist and engineer,

because it's kind of like an academic journal. You know, it's like, like, you know, in my ambition, like the nature of crypto or something like that, sort of, right? The nature slash the Atlantic, long form, technical, and calm and pragmatic. And I think that's the spirit that we're trying to get with this. You know, I don't know if I would call them religious. I think that's a great characterization of Satoshi. Yeah. If there were to be a religious comparison, I would compare him to a tragic mythical figure as well.

Interesting. A tantalus or Prometheus because he, you know. He gave fire. He not only gave fire, but he was then punished for it essentially in that he couldn't take credit for his invention as a human without suffering dire personal consequences. Yeah, but he seems to me. I mean, I have my thesis on who Satoshi is or was. but you know there's there's some folks who um who do things just for the status like anonymous donors like anonymous philanthropic donors right there's some folks who do something just for the satisfaction of it

right and what's also about Satoshi is he never moved the coins I mean look I have nothing against people making a profit more power to them and so on but that's truly like you know just this incredible yeah the restraint the restraint the restraint is insane the Opsic you know he you know he like there's so many things. He used pseudonymity as a shield, not a sword, right? He never put on a mask to go and attack. He used it for defense. Like every single tradeoff there, you know, he made an ethical way, right? You know, it was a technology. It was a fundamental breakthrough in computer science. And it's something where that's a spirit that I think is actually what drew me in part to Bitcoin and to cryptocurrency. That's a spirit that I think is legitimate part of the space and what

many of these folks got into the space for. I mean, like, I don't know if you saw the thing where Satoshi thanked Zuko. Yeah. In 2010, Zuko, like, who's here before a lot of other people, right, a lot of other people, Zucco was paying attention to it, wrote a blog post on it. That was actually a material contribution to Bitcoin in the very earliest days. The first blog post about Bitcoin really. That's right. And, you know, he was talking to him about zero knowledge, and he actually carried that through it as E-Cash, right? So I think that, that's the legitimate intellectual lineage of this, right? And that's what I want to talk about.

That's what we named Nakamoto. Well, that's an awesome place to leave it. I can't tell you how thankful we are that you took the time to speak today. This was a fun episode. Where can people learn more about Nakamoto and where can they follow you? Well, Nakamoto.com and

Twitter.com front slash Nakamoto. And I'm BologiS. Twitter.com. com slash Balogias. And thanks, guys. We'll look more soon.